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Neville Lewis (1895-1972)
Alfred Neville Lewis (South African, 1895-1972)
Sir Daniel and Lady Hall
signed 'LEWIS' (lower right)
oil on canvas
94 x 142cm (37 x 55 7/8in).
Footnotes
Exhibited
London, Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, 7 May - 11 August 1923, no. 585.
Cape Town-born artist Neville Lewis began his artistic education at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1914. Following two years of study, he served in the British army in France and Italy during the Great War before returning to London in 1919, where he made a living as a portrait painter until 1938.
This impressive double portrait, painted when Lewis was only 28 years old, was his first to be accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy. The sitters are Sir Alfred Daniel Hall, FRS, (1864-1942) and his second wife Ida, née Beaver. Sir Daniel was an 'agricultural educationist' from Rochdale, Lancashire. He was principal of Wye College and director of Rothamsted Experimental Station. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1909, and made KCB in 1918 for service as the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Agriculture. Author of various books on agriculture and science, he delivered a paper in Cape Town in 1905 on 'Recent developments in agricultural science', he also wrote a paper on 'Rural education appropriate to colonial life and agriculture in South Africa'. His personal interests included tulips and oriental art, as is evidenced in the present lot, indeed he went on to publish The Book of the Tulip in 1929.
The portrait was probably commissioned to commemorate Sir Daniel's second marriage. His first wife, Mary, passed away in 1921, and he married the second Lady Hall the following year. In the lower right corner of the painting we can see a letter in Sir Daniel's hand. It is signed 'A Neville Lewis', and most likely contains correspondence regarding this commission.
Bibliography
Paul Brassley, 'Hall, Sir (Alfred) Daniel (1864–1942)' in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford, 2004).
ALFRED NEVILLE LEWIS (SOUTH AFRICAN, 1895-1972) Sir Daniel and Lady Hall signed ‘LEWIS’ (lower right) oil on canvas 94 x 142cm (37 x 55 7/8in).
Exhibited: London, Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, 7 May - 11 August 1923, no. 585. Cape Town-born artist Neville Lewis began his artistic education at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1914. Following two years of study, he served in the British army in France and Italy during the Great War before returning to London in 1919, where he made a living as a portrait painter until 1938. This impressive double portrait, painted when Lewis was only 28 years old, was his first to be accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy. The sitters are Sir Alfred Daniel Hall, FRS, (1864-1942) and his second wife Ida, née Beaver. Sir Daniel was an ‘agricultural educationist’ from Rochdale, Lancashire. He was principal of Wye College and director of Rothamsted Experimental Station. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1909, and made KCB in 1918 for service as the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Agriculture. Author of various books on agriculture and science, he delivered a paper in Cape Town in 1905 on ‘Recent developments in agricultural science’, he also wrote a paper on ‘Rural education appropriate to colonial life and agriculture in South Africa’. His personal interests included tulips and oriental art, as is evidenced in the present lot, indeed he went on to publish The Book of the Tulip in 1929. The portrait was probably commissioned to commemorate Sir Daniel’s second marriage. His first wife, Mary, passed away in 1921, and he married the second Lady Hall the following year. In the lower right corner of the painting we can see a letter in Sir Daniel’s hand. It is signed ‘A Neville Lewis’, and most likely contains correspondence regarding this commission.
Bibliography: Paul Brassley, ‘Hall, Sir (Alfred) Daniel (1864–1942)’ in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford, 2004).
Auden (W.H.) Series of six autograph letters signed (Wystan), subscribed with love, to his Oxford contemporary Vincent (Peter) Allom, the letters covering a wide range of the poet's youthful concerns, including qualms over his homosexuality: I am glad everything has turned out so pleasantly for you - for the present at anyway. There still lingers in my mind the idea of something indecent in a mutual homosexual relation, I shall be interested to know how exactly you feel about it. I am sure I should be miserable! I am am used to hear of your mother's approval... his aims in editing Oxford Poetry (...The Muse has been well enough, and the preface to Oxford Poetry is as important as the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads...), Ango Saxon verse (seven lines of which he quotes), their tutor Neville Coghill (...I am touched to hear about your reactions to that evening Perhaps, I am a trifle ealous. Did you see Neville described... as 'a tall smartly dressed young man......), reading parties, mutual friends (...I have had a letter from Williams, enjoying himself, though more erotically than usefully...), writing pro'e cts (...I am going to write a book on Anglo-Latin writers up till the end of the 14 century...), reading (...In my spare time I read late Latin Priapea! ..), his health (...got back yesterday only to take to my bed with indolent ulcers and general sepsis...), foreign excursions (... Yugoslavia has the hottest climate and the slowest trains in Europe... I think I forgot to tell you that I went to Yugoslavia instead of Iceland...), Allom's mother, etc., the two later letters touching on travel plans am going to Berlin in October for a year...) and his future career still here for this term, then probably into films...), one on a postcard, 8 pages, the letters with envelopes (one marked by Auden Read Spengler] Pascall Can't think of anything else), occasional light spotting and creasing, 4to and 8vo, the first four from Birmingham, the fifth from Penrith and the last from Downs School postmarked 10 July 1927, 19 August 1927, 29 September 1927, 27 August 1928, 24 August 1929, and 7 May 1935 E600-800 Peter Allom and Auden were contemporaries at Oxford, both having Neville Coghill as their tutor. They met during Auden's first term at a party of the Hypocrites Club: At this party [ Auden] met for the first time, and made sexual advances to, V.M. ('Peter') Allom, an undergraduate at Exeter College. Allom did not respond sexually, but became friends with Auden for the rest of their undergraduate years (Humphrey Carpenter, Wh. Auden, 198] p.65n, where two extracts are printed, that on mutual homosexual relations, its source unattributed p.49, and the Lyrical Ballads, p. 70n, see also Wh. Auden: juvenilia, edited by Katherine Bucknell, 1994 p.xl). Allom's copies of the 1927 and 1928 editions of Oxford Poetry, edited by Auden (with contributions by Auden, Day-Lewis, Driberg, Macneice, Rex Warner, and Isherwood) are included in the lot, the first containing Allom's poem 'An Ornithological View of Existence', which he had written in honour of his friend's birthday and which he insisted be published anonymously. Also included in the lot are Allom's copies of Ellot's Criterion for January 1930 and October 193 ] printing Auden's 'Paid on Both Sides' and 'Speech for a Prize Day' ( Allom being present when Auden read this to Coghill).
[ Books ] LEWIS, DAVID The Naked Eye Cape Town: Paul Koston, 1946 b/w illustrations 8vo cloth, dustjacket, dustjacket frittered and repaired and LEWIS, NEVILLE, Studio Encounters (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1963), cloth, dustjacket, b/w illustrations (2)
painted in brown monochrome in the center with a spread-winged eagle perched on a monument inscribed within an oval on its base WASHINGTON, beside it a willow tree, the lower edge of the cavetto with a brown-edged worn gilt band beneath a gilt-heightened and flower-filled drapery swag entwined with a gold and brown flowering vine interrupted at the top of the rim with an oval monogrammed in iron-red and gold JRS, and the rim edge (two small chips) with a salmon-ground border of brown and gold leaves and gold stars between gilt-dashed or dotted iron-red bands, (general wear). Length 18 1/2 in. (47 cm.) This platter is from a much-illustrated but remarkably under-documented service, which, in its depiction of a monument to Washington, assumed to be his tomb, must have been ordered shortly after the great patriot's death on December 14, 1799, when the new republic was consumed with national mourning, and representations of grief proliferated in America's decorative and fine arts. The central decoration probably was inspired by a contemporary print (a similar rendering of the tomb appears on early 19th-Century transfer-decorated Liverpool creamware, jugs, an example of which is illustrated by Robert H. McCauley, Liverpool Transfer Designs on Anglo-American Pottery, pl. XXC, no. 63), while the border decoration is well known in Chinese Export porcelain of the early 19th Century. What has generally remained mysterious, however, is the identity of the original owner of this service, probably because the monogram on the rim has been misread consistently as JRL rather than JRS, which has encouraged such unsubstantiatable provenances as Judith and Robert Lewis (the daughter-in-law and son of George Washington's sister Betty [1733-97] and her husband Fielding Lewis [1723-81]), and John R. Latimer, who, according to Le Corbeiller, Patterns of Exchange, p. 119, was a Philadelphia merchant active in the China trade from about 1815 to 1833. Mrs. Le Corbeiller also cites Hyde, who on p. 130 states that two dinner services with this decoration are known, and made about the year 1800 for Philadelphia families, though Hyde describes only the service monogrammed J.R.L. Mrs. Le Corbeiller, however, illustrates an octagonal plate, ibid., p. 118, no. 50, which she indicates is monogrammed PAS, and which could represent the second serrvice, though this too could be a misreading of the script monogram JRS. Certainly, the most revealing information about the possible identity of the original owner of this mourning service has been provided by Stacia G. Norman, Curator/Program Coordinator of Kenmore, the historic house museum in Fredericksburg, Virginia, which has three pieces of this service in its collections, one of which was donated with a hand-written provenance. This and further research has proven that they were actually owned by Joseph Sims of Philadelphia. The Sims' furnishings were auctioned in 1824, and documentation is found in a letter from Louisa E. Ewing to her brother Maskell C. Ewing, dated Janry 12th 1824 and reprinted in The American Magazine, Volume III, number 2, 1987-88, p. 43. In addition to a drawing of Joseph Sims' impressive Classical-style house, the letter describes the interior and its more notable contents: The week before christmass I spent in town and as Sims's furniture oposite to Uncle Pattersons was sold I went to see it. The front parlour had an elegant organ which took up one side of the room, there was another organ for chanting, and an old piano. The carpet was turkish but very much worn, the chairs were mahogony with hair seats, very old fashioned and worn out....The curtains were blue crimson and yellow damask with a portrait of washington in the center of the middle drapery, they were the handsomest I ever saw....Upstairs was a very handsome library with glass ships, chinese mandarines, busts, paintings, marble figures etc. to fill it up. All the china had the tomb of washington in the center of every piece. I have now given you a description of all that was worth notice.... Of the various pieces from this service illustrated in the standard reference works on Chinese Export porcelain, only Howard and Ayers, Volume II, p. 494, no. 504, who illustrate a vegetable tureen cover, have correctly identified the monogram as JRS. (The same piece is illustrated by Trubner and Rathbone, p. 39 [bottom], no. 14.) The other examples all have been misidentified as JRL, or not identified at all. Beurdeley illustrates a plate, p. 156, cat. 37, and a jardiniere, p. 201, cat. 220, which is the same jardiniere illustrated by Hyde, p. 134, pl. XXVI, no. 101. Gordon, pp. 144 and 145, pls. 135 and 136 illustrates a sauce tureen and an 11-inch platter; Mudge, Chinese Export Porcelain for the American Trade, p. 201, fig. 110 illustrates a plate, an oval platter (missing its strainer) and a pot de creme, probably one of the two pots de creme illustrated by Palmer, p. 132, fig. 88b; and the tomb detail from a teabowl is illustrated in The Reeves Collection, p. 54, fig. 55, no. 260. An octagonal hot water dish from this service is illustrated in Chinese Export Porcelain, an Historical Survey (Elinor Gordon, Editor), color pl. XI; and another oval platter lacking its strainer is illustrated ibid., p. 117, fig. 8, and p. 72, fig. 5a, where a plate with a slightly overinterpreted imitation of this decoration, made by the Vivinis factory in Paris, probably early in the 20th Century, is illustrated as fig. 5b, providing an interesting postscript to the enduring popularity of George Washington in life and death. We wish to acknowledge with thanks the contributions of Stacia G. Norman, who credited Mrs. Joseph Carson of Philadelphia with having discovered the Louisa Ewing letter's reference to the Sims porcelain; and Neville Thompson of the library at the Henry F. du Pont Winterthur Museum, who made a copy of the published letter from an obscure periodical available at a moment's notice. Although no biographical information about Joseph Sims had been found at the time of this printing, this research will be the next interesting step in the identification of this service.